Seed (30 page)

He made his way quietly to the valley’s rim. The Kansas plains shone chrome as far as the eye could see beneath a sliver of moon. He wandered among the abandoned vehicles until he came to where Anna’s trucks had settled like rusted behemoth ticks into the dust.

He moved to the back of the cargo truck, crawled beneath its tarp—began rooting through heaps of scrap metal, rusted engine parts, folds of dusty canvas, tools, pieced-out electronics, searching for what he knew had to be there.

He found it buried deep under a pile of camo netting. A long duffel bag. Five smaller satchels lay packed inside it, identical to the one he’d used in the raid on the caravan in Oklahoma. He pulled one out, reached inside. Felt soft, plastic-wrapped bricks. Outside, he held one brick up in the moonlight. Faded block letters ran the length of a peeling label: SEMTEX.

“That’s nasty stuff.”

Brood started. A shadow stepped from behind the rusted hull of a nearby water truck. Brood saw scarecrow limbs in the moonlight.

“Jorgen. Fuck,
ese
, about made me piss my pants.”

“What’re you doing?” Jorgen stepped closer, motioned at the brick in Brood’s hand. “Going to make us some pudding?” His easy drawl sounded wry, but his face remained humorless.

“Nah,” Brood said. “I’m stealing it. For trade.”

“That won’t get you a ride to Denver.”

Brood turned. Anna stood there, wide-hipped and tiny beside a truck twice her height. The black length of a fuckstick dangled loose in her hand. Brood looked from her to Jorgen and back.

“I got to go,
Madre
,” he said. “He’s my brother.”

“We’re your family now, Brood.” Anna’s face took on the pained expression of a parent doing what needed to be done. The fuckstick swung wide as she opened her arms, beseeching. “The Mother gave you to us. We need your help.”

“The Mother.” Brood laughed, a callous sound. “You knew where this place was before we drank that
humedo
.” Behind him, Jorgen moved close. Brood aimed his gaze at the fuckstick. “You my family, you’d let me go.”

“You could choose to stay,” Anna said.

Brood nodded. “Yeah. Alright.”

He spun. Slammed the water jug across Jorgen’s face. The tall man staggered back. Brood threw the duffle of Semtex. Anna watched, calmly, as it arced towards her in the moonlight. It fell with a thud into the dust at her feet.

“It’s very stable stuff,” she said. Her head canted to one side, like,
what did you expect
? The fuckstick rose in her hand. Brood heard it sizzle, saw a flash of blue light. Then everything turned into fire.

CHAPTER 19

he assault was fucked, right from the get go. Falcon 2 went down, with its full chalk of troops, four minutes south of Riley. Thirteen kids who, for a week, had called themselves Rangers, plus two more who had called themselves pilot and gunner.

Doss experienced the crash as an abrupt spike in coms chatter, shrill and incoherent, as green pilots in Falcons 1, 3 and 4, along with Ops at Riley, tried to sort out what had happened, succeeded, then panicked.

Forty-year-old nuke-powered jets wailed. Hard Gs yanked Doss against the shoulder hooks of her drop seat as Falcon 1 fell into a trajectory towards the crash site. She craned her neck to peer down the Flylight’s length, past the reflective visors of her young Rangers in their drop suits, through the cockpit’s windscreen. For a moment, nothing out there but predawn blackness. Then a brief glimpse of flame smeared across prairie, a white-hot nuclear star burning at its center. A containment breach in Falcon 2’s reactor. It would burn for months, vaporizing everything, leaving only a glass bowl the size of a small stadium carved into the prairie floor. An untouchable, radioactive marker for a mass grave. Doss had seen a hundred craters like it pocking the deserts of Saud and Iran, and the vast refinery cities of Siberia. Nothing left for a family to bury except a printed honorarium that looked like a high school diploma, placed with great ceremony into an empty coffin. Doss tried to remember the name of the kid Gomez had put in charge of Chalk 2. Tried to remember the Falcon’s pilot. Recalled only that they had been children.

The pilot’s mouth moved fast against her headset mic in the instrument panel’s bile-colored loom. The Go Pills, which Doss thought had leveled off, resurged. She clenched her teeth, suppressing an insane urge to scream, chinned her mic.

“All players, this is Lead.” It frightened her how chill and far away her voice sounded in her head set. “I want radio silence unless I specifically address you. Repeat: Shut the fuck up.” Coms went quiet. “All Falcons, give me a sitrep.”

“We’re solid, Boss.” Doss watched her Falcon’s pilot set her jaw, resolute. She sounded young. Tense, but steady. “Combat functional.”

“Ah…” came Falcon 3’s pilot. He sounded like he’d barely reached puberty. “Ah,” he said again. Fiorivani’s voice cut in.

“Falcon 3 is combat functional.” Hard as a knife point. “Mos def.”

“Falcon 4 is combat functional,” came Gomez’s voice. “Fucking A.” Within the red combat glow of her drop suit, Doss smiled.

“Riley,” she said. “Report.”

“Falcon 2 is definitely down,” Chen stated. “He reported trouble with his controls, then we lost him.”

“Hostiles?” she asked. A pause.

“Nothing on scope.”

Doss wasn’t surprised. Sketchy gear, raw troops: the whole enterprise begged for disaster. Maybe an ancient seal in the Flylight’s engine had cracked in the dry heat of a half-century of storage. Or a bearing had failed. A green pilot had gotten scared of the dark. Whatever. Thirteen kids playing Ranger, plus a pilot and gunner, gone. Doss bit her lip, tasted the rust tang of blood.

“Riley, what’s General Lewis’ position?” She imagined Lewis, head tilted back, reading the tiny info scroll along the bottoms of his specs, patiently awaiting an opportunity to appear useful. He’d taken a zep out ahead of the Falcons. To ferry out refugees he’d said. Doss had set her own zep to zombie a holding pattern fifteen miles off objective, but Lewis had insisted on helping. And technically speaking, he was a general, so what could Doss really do?

“Lewis is holding steady at fifteen K feet, ten miles off objective.”

Doss made a hard calculation, weighed the diminishing odds of success against the ever looming specter of Fucking Up. Chinned her mic.

“All players, mission is still go. Chalk 1, we’re taking the objective by ourselves. Chalk 3, you take over perimeter from Chalk 2.”

“Copy that,” Fiorivani said.

“Chalk 4, you’re still overwatch.”

“Copy,” came Gomez.

“Chen, make sure Lewis stays out of my way.”

“Roger that.”

“All Falcons, resume assault formation. Missiles hot, scopes cold. Don’t paint any targets until we’re close enough to bite.” Pilots acknowledged.

Doss’ guts heaved as her pilot dropped the Falcon, close enough to the deck to drag cock, and punched burners. A red LED in Doss’ visor ticked backwards from nine minutes. The time it would take the Falcons to rail their way supersonic across Kansas.

Her mouth felt dry. The titanium hull vibrated through her drop suit. Go Pills tickled her nerves. When the LED hit two minutes, she chinned her mike.

“Chalks ready,” she ordered.

“Yes, Ma’am!” all Rangers chorused. It made Doss smile. She’d armed them with fucksticks, side arms, stun grenades. Toys with which they’d have a difficult time killing themselves. Rangers indeed.

The LED hit one minute. An orange light appeared on jump bay’s ceiling.

“Falcons, paint your targets and fire.”

A second passed. Several loud bangs sounded in the hull. Missiles detaching themselves. Doss craned her head, watched through the cockpit window as fingers of yellow flame screamed away over the prairie. Suppression ordnance, a combination of concussion and sonics that would detonate over the valley.

Her stomach lurched as her Falcon abruptly climbed, then leveled. The light in the ceiling switched to red.

“Rangers are go!” she called. She patted hands over her gear. M-8 strapped across her chest, Mark 30 G-launcher slung underneath. Fuckstick on one hip, .45 on the other. Two frag grenades on her drop suit’s left breast, two stunners over the right. Pig sticker on her left forearm. Cookie cutter charge packed against the small of her back.

Compression joints hissed as she moved. Seven of her young Rangers had died in training jumps the past two weeks because of fucked suits. Hydraulic shocks, stale from storage, failed to perform—suits had crumpled like beer cans. The kids inside…

Fear didn’t touch Doss. Maybe it was the Go Pills, maybe just the fact that she loved this shit too much to care. She wanted to tear somebody’s throat out with her teeth. She laughed…realized a split second later she’d forgotten to chin off her mic.

The light flashed green. Drop seats slammed open with a metallic crack, ejecting Rangers.

Freefall. Creamy dawn light poured for five silent seconds through Doss’ visor. It was the best thing she’d felt since Emerson had—

Impact. It rang her bones like a bell. Readouts on her visor fizzled, came back to life. Doss flexed fingers, bent knees, mentally stated her own name—decided she was still alive. The suit had done its job, a thousand nano-hydraulic joints compressing, absorbing terminal Gs.

She stood in a cornfield, in the nadir of a knee-deep impact crater. Two Rangers stood close beside her, red
Chupe
stripes visible on their shoulders. Jake and Casanova, already oriented and intent on protecting her. She spotted the dome two hundred meters off.

“Rangers, sound off,” she ordered. They did, one through seven, nine through thirteen. “Eight?” No answer. “Eight?” she repeated.

“Down,” somebody said. Doss spied a heap of crushed metal through a row of chin-tall corn stalks. They had no medics.

“Twelve and thirteen, you’re on eight. Everyone else, on me.” Rangers gathered around her, titanium-and-ceramic drop suits shimmering silver as the day came on, mirrored visors hiding the children inside. “Lieutenant?”

“In position,” Fiorivani said. “Got your six.” Doss gripped the M-8 with her right hand, drew her fuckstick with her left.

“Let’s go.”

Hydraulic legs pumped. Doss lead her Rangers hard and fast towards the dome, ten meters at a step. A new readout appeared in the bottom left of her visor: an overhead view of the valley as Falcon 4 took up overmatch and began to transmit. Superimposed blue dots showed friendlies, red dots anything else with a pulse.

The suppression ordnance had done its job. Sonics still hovered overhead, wreaking limbic havoc with vicious feedback loops, which the drop suits squelched with dampening frequencies. Hundreds of red dots covered the valley. None of them moved.

Doss saw bodies everywhere as she ran. In the fields, in a large open space beside the dome, up amongst the vehicles parked along the valley’s rim. Beautiful landraces and weathered-looking migrants all lay commingled, unconscious where they’d slept. Her chalk met no resistance, reached the dome without so much as sparking a fuckstick.

Doss moved to the dome’s wall. The blue dots of her Rangers automatically spread out to cover her. Quick learners. For an instant Doss let herself feel pride. She let the M-8 tangle from its sling, took the cookie cutter from its slot at the small of her back. Peeled its adhesive strip and stuck it to the dome’s strange skin. She thumbed the safety switch, hit the hot button.

“Fire in the hole!”

She leapt away. Young Rangers sank low. The charge detonated with a hard thud. Meat and bone erupted as a ragged orifice, large enough to walk through, appeared in the dome’s side. Four Rangers hurled stun grenades through it. More thuds. Flashes illuminated the dome’s bone work frame through its flesh.

“Inside,” Doss commanded. “Fast and tight.”

She led the way, following the front sight of her M-8. Through the hole, into the dome: a round space the size of small zep hangar. Rangers behind her unleashed their fucksticks to either side, just on principle. It sounded like glass shattering.

Nothing moved. A dozen bodies lay across the floor. Doss moved to them one by one, prodding them with a titanium boot tip. All were unconscious landraces, thick as pack animals. She moved further into the dome, her Rangers tight on her ass. Fleshy sacks, suspended from the ceiling, pulsed overhead, as though the dome itself squirmed with pain. White smoke from the stun grenades obscured her view. She switched her visor to thermal, saw the red outlines of bodies ahead.

“Movement.” She yanked a stun grenade from her chest and hurled it. “Fire in the hole!” The thumper detonated like a hammer strike. An inhuman shriek followed. Movement still showed in the thermals. Something coming towards her, hard and fast. Doss knew what it was.

She sank to a knee, let loose two short bursts with the M-8. Another shriek as explosive ceramics found their mark. Still, the advocate came. It emerged from the smoke, a thin woman showing teeth. Doss’ bullets had torn off an arm, ripped a cavity in the thing’s chest. She fired two more bursts. Jake and Casanova came up beside her, firing pistols. The advocate flew apart.

Doss rose, slapped a fresh mag into the M-8. She moved forward, inspecting pieces. There wasn’t much left. The woman’s head lay away from the rest of her. It smiled dimly, exposing shark’s teeth, then went vacant.